Tag Archives: Beavercreek

The Lammers site pollution investigation has finally seen the light of day. Beavercreek is running it as a 3-part series on Thursdays, starting yesterday. Xenia, Fairborn and Bellbrook are running it as a 3-part series on Fridays starting today. Wilmington is running it as a 2-part series, today and Saturday.

(Since this post was first written, I have added links to the final parts in the series. Otherwise this post is unchanged.)

Part I and Part II made an appearance on the web for Xenia. Part III didn’t make it there for whatever reason. Here are Xenia’s PDFs of the story: Part I, Part II and Part III.

Wilmington didn’t place it online, but here are their two PDFs: Part I and Part II.

If you’re from a big paper, you might find it odd that I just give out the PDFs like that. Don’t worry — all these papers are owned by Brown Publishing, and they offer the PDFs for free to everyone, every morning on their websites.

I don’t think any of these papers ended up using my multimedia online, at least as of yet. But here are links to that stuff:

Here’s a really cool feature: a video of the actual 1969 fire that released all the pollution. It was shot by a Beavercreek fireman with a Super 8 camera. Since the video itself didn’t have sound, music was inserted into the background when the footage was digitized a few years ago. Kip Smith, currently Battalion Chief with the Beavercreek Fire Department, was kind enough to narrate the 15-minute long video. (He was at the fire, too.)

Last but not least, you can view a slideshow of pictures I took about a month ago at the site itself. I know you’ll be curious about this place, so spare yourself from getting the cancer-causing chemicals on your shoes and look at the pictures I took.

I produced this TV news package for a newswriting class this semester. I’m currently working on a full-blown cross-platform version of this story. That’ll include a web (text) version as well as three radio stories, a slideshow, SMS updates, PDF copies of official documents, extended “directors cut” interviews and more.

Sadly, until I can render a version of the video above in a less-compressed format (I did it in AVI), it looks like Youtube will play it squished. Even though I followed all directions about aspect ratio, the site scrunches my video in from both sides, killing the native 16×9. I don’t like it as-is, but it’s still viewable until I have more time to re-render.

The “anchor” is played by my friend Chris P. Powers, and he also did all the Adobe Premiere work involved, plus the graphics. The research took a long while, but his work really makes it look professional. Thanks, Chris!